Who Watches the Watchdogs?
by Hydroxide
Summary: Different city, different system. Instead of Chicago, it's Los Angeles; instead of ctOS, it's Omnis Unity. But there's still a vigilante, and there are still secrets left undiscovered. These are the personal logs of Mr Pearce, aka R@scal, in his hunt for Blume's ultimate creation: an AI system so advanced, it would soon redefine what it meant to be truly sentient.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: I own nothing but a dead phone with no battery.**

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><p>I'm running now.<p>

Night time in Los Angeles is either beautiful or dangerous, depending on whether you're fifteen stories above street level, or at street level.

I'm at street level. More precisely, South Central street level. At 2 am. And I'm chasing an armed man through back alleys in one of the most crime-ridden urban sectors in the United States.

Yeah, this is a bad idea.

The wind whips through my hair. The smell of months-old rat shit and miscellaneous garbage hits me like a wave every time I vault over a dumpster into another alley. My gloves give me good grip, and my running shoes aren't giving up on me yet, which means I'm making good progress.

Unfortunately, the guy in front of me is just as good. He's jumping over obstacles seamlessly, sprinting over slippery films of sewage without stumbling. He springs onto a fence and begins to climb.

He hits the ground on the other side just as I begin climbing. He's about fifteen feet away by the time I land on my feet. And it's just then, as I'm catching my breath after a fifteen-minute pursuit, when I see him stop, turn around, and reach into his coat.

Of course. Fixers are always armed, Omnis be damned.

Since the Omnis system was put into place, gun control in LA had become tighter than a miser's purse. Blume had learned from its mistakes with gang violence and weapons smuggling in Chicago, and had taken a harder line here. What the ctOS failed to do in Chicago, Omnis succeeded at doing in LA: the crackdown on weapons ownerships was brutal and efficient enough to probably send Deep South conservatives into cardiac arrest. Through a thousand security cameras, smart phones, user chat histories and Facebook pages, Omnis sought out any and all civilian firearms with a vengeance. Dad's shotguns were confiscated. Gun stores were shut down. Having a handgun in your pocket meant twenty years in prison, maybe ten for parole. And yes, the lawmakers were on their side, and the right wing was suspiciously quiet. I'm not saying blackmail, but—alright, yes. I _am_ saying blackmail.

So whoever this guy was, he had to have some serious connections to still be packing heat.

Sadly, that meant the equation was now 'unarmed guy vs armed guy.'

What was the saying again? _If catapults are outlawed, then only outlaws will have catapults._

Nice work, Omnis.

It's right then, when the silhouette of the .45 emerges from his coat, that I notice the fuse box right next to his head.

My left hand reaches for the phone. The remote profiler—thank heavens for the magnificent piece of software—had already highlighted every relevant moving part in a half-block radius that Omnis had control over. Voltage gates. Safety fuses.

One tap of the screen.

The fuse box explodes like a firework. I brace myself and look on as the fixer is thrown five feet in the air like a ragdoll, before crumpling in a painful-looking heap on the opposite wall.

I march forward. The fuse box sputters and smokes, but I ignore it. Time is short. The bang probably roused every household in five blocks, and the gangbangers, crack heads, and assorted criminal personalities would soon be heading here to investigate. Usually the crack heads get here first. Go figure.

I kick the gun away. He's either knocked out or dead, but either way I don't really care. There's a nasty burn mark on his face—second degree, probably—that's taken away almost all of his eyebrows and a chunk off his cheek.

_Ah, there it is._

The flash drive is clutched in his hand. I un-clutch it. And then I pocket it.

And I get the bloody hell away from there.

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><p>The flash drive loads up without a hitch. Everything works like a charm; our dear fixer friend hadn't managed to either copy the data or corrupt it beyond recovery before I very politely crashed in on his apartment.<p>

System keys. Phone records. Bank account details.

The laptop screen hurts my eyes. I dim it. The apartment is pitch black because I'm too lazy to turn on the lights.

I've got the keys to an offshore bank account marked 'Zurich.' Eight million bloody dollars. Siphoned off pyramid schemes and investment scams marketed to retirees and poor old ladies. I look down the list. Some of the hits are miniscule, couple of hundred dollars lost, flushed down the drain as far as the victims were concerned. Some of the takings run into the tens of thousands.

I pull up the list of schmucks.

Turns out that Mrs Frei from two blocks down was hit. Sixty-two years old, husband deceased, only daughter in college and struggling with tuition fees and living expenses. She sold off her car and pooled together whatever money she had left in the bank, scrimping together just enough to put dear Rachel through college and possible have some left over for rent in that little old run-down corner lot.

Then eleven thousand dollars vanished overnight. A sound investment, they had told her. Dear old Mrs Frei, an East German immigrant that moved over after the Berlin Wall collapsed, whose only experience with finances for half her life was with food stamps and ration cards, never suspected a thing when she gladly forked over all she had, thinking that she was at last going to make ends meet.

_Ding._

Eleven thousand dollars, back in Mrs Frei's account.

I move down the list.

Thirty-five names. Eight million dollars neatly distributed in the end. Wrongs righted, debts repaid. The world turned the right way round, at least for tonight, for thirty five families.

I take a breather. It's four in the morning. I have to be up and about by six thirty.

On the other hand, I spot something interesting. And I do some digging.

Another account. Personal this time, hidden behind a couple of information protection protocols. Twenty million dollars. Possibly belonging to the ringleader of the scam.

So, twenty million dollars. I can get some serious hardware with that. Maybe one of those new scramblers they're chattering about on the Darknet. I'd become invisible to Omnis. Gone for good. Or finally get to pack some heat; something powerful enough to make a difference, but smart enough to skirt round the city's draconian firearm regulations. A pulse pistol—overloads your sensorineural system, sends you into a brief coma, no lasting damage so no bodies on your account. Would have made a difference in that alley tonight.

Instead, I find myself getting to work. Moving down the list, again.

All money leaves a digital footprint. You can't quite erase it. A transaction, after all, is a dollar moving from someone's pocket into someone else's pocket. Which means that a record of it is going to be around somewhere. What I can do, though, is to bury the trail so deep that anybody intending to do any digging would find themselves up for _months _of work.

Just in case, I plant a handy Trojan in a few neat places. Trip-wires, just in case somebody comes snooping. I need to be careful. Blume had cleaned up its work; the Omnis online monitoring system is like a Rottweiler on roid rage. Leave a trail of crumbs, and Omnis will hunt you down with a ferocity and accuracy that makes ctOS look like a Chihuahua.

The best defence, of course, is making sure the people you're helping don't shoot their mouths off.

Eleven million dollars is now gone. I hope that's all the bastard had left in his account, because payback would be a _bitch_. In this particular case, _my _bitch.

I lean back and admire my work.

Mrs Frei just received thirty thousand dollars in her account. Clean as a whistle, untraceable as far as I'm concerned. I smile and hope she finally gets some new clothes. The ones she wears during volunteer work at the homeless shelter look like they were purchased before colour television was a thing.

Just in case, I leave a note. A small appendix to the transfer, set to self-delete after opened. A personal touch to a really impersonal line of work.

"_For Mrs Frei. Hope this helps with Rachel's tuition and the car. Don't talk about this, don't ask questions. Make small purchases, nothing too big or too many, too fast._

_Yours truly,_

_R scal_

_PS. Get a new dress. I hear Imelda's Boutique is having a sale."_

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><p>Yeah, you probably guessed who I am. If not for the news reports, then the online chatter. 'The vigilante' all over again. Crimes stopped in their tracks by malfunctioning city infrastructure and suspiciously early tips to the police. Online scams blown wide open, the funds recovered and sent back to the victims.<p>

They can't help but connect the dots, can't they? Speculation's running wild, at least over the Darknet. It's Chicago once more. The same guy. The Fox. The Chicago city vigilante, the man who shut down ctOS 1.0, the man who brought Blume to its knees at least for a few months. Aiden Pearce.

Well, sadly, wrong on all counts but one. Well, half, really. I have been in Chicago, but it was a long time ago and too many bad things happened there for me to associate myself in any way with that place. I'm not calling myself the Fox, that's just tacky. I'm not the thug-punching, gun-toting vigilante, because anything more lethal than a BB gun is a prison sentence here in LA.

Also, for the record, Aiden Pearce served eight years in Bolivia as a private military contractor and three years as a freelance fixer, with enough training in Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to probably open his own dojo. The man's a sleek killing—or incapacitating—machine, built like a predator, and hunts like one. He's scary, he scares me sometimes. He's a monster in every sense of the word. I'm not. I've got a day job and a life in university. I hit the gym five times a week and do free-running when I can afford the time, but I'm not a soldier. I do my best work from behind a screen, through the network. Tonight's parkour adventure through the streets was probably the most strenuous thing I did in a month. So, no, I'm not some tough son-of-a-bitch like my uncle.

Did I say uncle? Oh yeah.

At least they got the last name right.

My name is Jackson Kent Pearce. Friends call me Jacks. Enemies, and the public, know me as R scal.

Welcome to Los Angeles.

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><p><strong>For the record, I unfortunately have no idea at all how hacking works, so forgive me for using technobabble to obscure my ignorance.<strong>

**I didn't mean to mislead, but unfortunately the character tag isn't exactly accurate since the name did not exist under options. Then again, nobody expects Jacks to show up. Not even Aiden.**

**Stay tuned.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer: I own nothing but memories of a house I've never seen and a girl I've never met.**

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><p><em>Darkchat loaded.<em>

_Rascal has logged in._

_Dmart4 has logged in._

_Dmart4: we need to meet_

_Rascal: what's the hurry?_

_Dmart4: darknet chatter is spiking_

_Dmart4: getting lots of talk about Blume's magnum opus getting rolled out soon_

_Dmart4: need to plan some field work_

_Rascal: urban legend shit_

_Rascal: bellwether?_

_Dmart4: yeah_

_Rascal: weve been through this before it's not possible it's just theoretical_

_Dmart4: hear me out_

_Dmart4: Blume's applied sciences division just got bought over wholesale_

_Rascal: who's the buyer_

_Dmart4: some virtual reality corporation in montreal_

_Dmart4: Abstergo Industries_

_Dmart4: transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of experimental prototypes_

_Dmart4: and there's one missing file. Blank. Like a black box. Locked behind a million layers of protection even I can't access._

_Rascal: you think it's bellwether_

_Rascal: and you want me to crack the file for you_

_Dmart4: if this is real it's gonna be big_

_Rascal: ten k. No budging_

_Dmart4: done deal_

_Rascal: where do I find you_

_Dmart4: don't bother I'll find you. 4.30 pm this thursday. Keep sharp_

_Rascal: Class ends 3.00 pm. Will be at East Parkside after that_

_Dmart4: the security on the locked file is bloody ridiculous. Can you get it open?_

_Rascal: no_

_Rascal: but i know someone who can_

_Dmart4 has disconnected_

_Rascal has disconnected_

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><p>People on the Darknet call it the Dead Pixel.<p>

An eight hundred square foot blank spot along Route 95 of the Sierra Nevada, completely cut off from any and all electronic means of communication. No cell phone coverage, no fibre optic for a hundred miles. No power lines or network-enabled transformers of any sort, implying either a patch of useless desert, or a fully independent power source. No noise or 'talk' to and from the area, no radar cross-section. All satellite images hacked to show nothing more than a blank spot of desert—hence the name.

There's been speculation on what it is. The most popular theories are either a top-secret Blume research site or an apocalyptic bunker to house American persons-of-value when the nukes go off.

I know the truth, of course. This is my uncle's house. The humble abode of the paranoid recluse, Aiden Pearce. Former vigilante, legally deceased, has a sister and nephew that don't like him.

I park my car. The driveway is a barren dirt stretch occupied by a battered-up Kuruhawa Motorsport 450. The house is a simple one-storey brick building and it looks exactly like how a hermit's house would look—run down, shady, and hundreds of years old. I also know that the proximity sensors and cameras would have picked me up from miles away.

Which is why I'm wearing something familiar. A dark cap, a blue sweater, and a black shirt. They don't stock Raving Rabbid shirts my size anymore, but I'm hoping the message gets through. I've no doubt that at least one automated sniper rifle is trained on me right now—best to be recognisable.

I knock.

He opens.

The Chicago city vigilante himself. His hair's greying, and there're wrinkles on his face. Those wrinkles rise as his face goes blank with surprise.

"Jacks."

I nod.

Wordlessly, he steps aside to let me in. The living room looks like crap. One beaten-up sofa, littered with newspapers and food packets, and a foldable plastic table set in the middle of the hall.

He motions for me to sit. Aiden Pearce, the fearsome vigilante, the Fox, now hobbles rather than walks or runs. He shuffles painfully towards the sofa, gripping the walking stick so hard his knuckles turn white.

It's the price of the life he lived. All the action heroes you see, they've got the benefit of good physio and a stuntman double when things get too tough. The heroism, the firefights, the endless running and jumping and tackling and close-quarters combat—all that has a cost. Your body is never made to take that much punishment, and his was no different. Sixty years old is roughly the time when all your debts come calling for payment. Total hip replacement, osteoarthritis, Type 2 diabetes, anxiety attacks, and the costs just keep rolling up.

I glance over the table. A little mountain of medication sits unsteadily atop it. Old people crap. Vasotec for blood pressure, Riomet for diabetes. About three kinds of painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs. The high-speed chases and kicking bad guys in the balls can't have been good news for his joints. I'm wondering where he gets his medication. The nearest pharmacist is ninety miles out.

"Jacks. How've you been? It's been a while."

I nod. "Alright."

He nods listlessly. "Nicole—she alright?"

"Mum's fine."

"I miss her."

The feeling was mutual. But both of them know by now that a meeting was never going to happen.

I take off my cap, then the vest. The whole outfit makes me want to hurl. Too many damn memories. Of Lena. Of Chicago. Of the shit that I had to call a childhood—running from place to place, cheap motels and late nights running low on gas miles out from the nearest town.

Little boy me blamed Uncle Aiden for all my problems. Adult me knew better, and that's why I hated him more. I saw why he did what he did, and the reasons he had for the choices he made. I saw as he saw. I acquired the skills that he learned, entered the world that he once owned.

The big reason why I bloody _absolutely _hate Aiden Pearce is that I'm walking in his footsteps.

Aiden sighs. He knows he's not making much headway with small talk. PTSD counselling and behavioural therapy be damned, I never did get my chattiness back. Dr Mendez did her best, but there's only so much you can do before adolescence sets in stone the wounds of childhood. Words never appealed to me the same way as they did to others. I never knew how people could _talk _as a way of finding pleasure, of letting off steam. Words were just a tool to me—one I used only when I needed to.

By the way, pick up Yolanda Mendez's new book on post-ctOS Chicago. It's actually pretty good. The whole vigilante and DedSec fiasco has given her enough writing material to last a lifetime.

I talk anyway.

"I need help. A system key, scrambled encryption, Omnis-OS. Can you do it?"

He stares at me. Then nods. "Yeah. I guess."

"Needs to be clean. No Dedsec or Tripe-zee nonsense."

"I worked on it alone. One-time use, unique code. Can't be replicated."

I nod. "Good." I hand him a flash drive. He takes it. His fingers are trembling, but he manages to clasp them around the flash drive anyway.

"Huh. Didn't know anybody still used flash drives." He smirks, trying to catch my eye.

"Old school tech. Older is safer." I shrug.

He sighs. For a moment, I forget all about the vigilante. All I see is an old man in a run-down house, surrounded by debris. He's spent. The high-octane days are behind him, and the only enemies he fights every day are ailing health, desert bugs and trip hazards.

"Jacks. Look at me." I do.

He struggles with words for a moment.

"Jacks. Stop this. Stop all this that you're doing." He waves the flash drive. "I know what you're up to. I've been keeping track of you ever since the first report of 'Rascal' came up in LA."

"I thought this place is shut off from the internet." I bristle.

"I read the papers, Jacks."

"Oh."

"I've been in that world, Jacks. I can't let you go in there. You don't belong there. There are things—things that you should never have to experience." He stares straight into my eyes, and I can see an eyelid twitch.

I look at my shoes. Then at him.

I find my voice. And it's bitter and angry.

"Don't you tell me what I should or shouldn't do." I rise to my feet. "I don't do this for you, I don't do this for myself. I do this because thirteen years ago, my sister was killed over petty blackmail secrets between powerful men in a rotten city."

I turn away to face the window. "I do this because in junior high, I used to like a girl called Jenny Weismann, whose father shot her and her mother before putting the last round through his head—all because a fixer evaporated their life savings. I do this because I used to play basketball with a guy called Marcus Timmons, before Omnis Unity profiled the plastic model gun in his apartment and sent him away to prison for twenty years under Section Twelve of the Lefarge Act. I do this because every day under Omnis, I see the city go to shit, while millions of cameras capture its glorious descent into that same shit."

I begin pacing. I've never been this talkative before. Dr Mendez would have been proud.

"It's their ghosts I see, I talk to. Their shadows I chase. Because unlike you, I've got no illusions about fixing a city that's already broken. But I do what I do, because it's who I am—who I've become—_who you've made me_."

My uncle looks up at me, pained, and I wonder who he sees. Not a do-gooder, that's for sure. Do-gooders volunteer at homeless shelters and give generously to SPCA. Do-gooders live good, clean, healthy lives. Do-gooders are angels on earth, and when they die, people build statues.

Do-gooders don't hunt down the fixer responsible for the Weismann family's murder suicide and hack into his car's central controls to send him off a bridge at seventy miles an hour. Do-gooders don't blackmail city officials with terabytes of planted child pornography in order to get Marcus Timmons' case reopened. Do-gooders don't do what I do—to take a corrupt, rotten game, and play it seamlessly like I was born to embrace the same corruption. When I die, fixers take whatever pieces are left off my work and cannibalise it—and then the game goes on.

So who does he see in me? A vigilante? Himself, or his own creation? The perfect formula for a vigilante's genesis is right there, that's for sure. Tragic childhood. Early abandonment. Lack of social stability in the formative years. A simmering bitterness against the world. A feeling of being cheated by the system. Ah, I'm giving things away. I've read Dr Mendez's book, and part of me is pissed that she knows my uncle better than I ever did.

He sighs, hunching over.

"What about Nicole?"

I don't say anything.

"She—she doesn't know about this, does she? Jacks, studying civil engineering in the day, and breaking the law by night. What about her, then? Who protects _her_?"

I finger my phone absently. "She's safe. I've covered my tracks well. Not even the most hardcore fixer will be able to link me back to—"

"Jacks, I'm not talking about her safety, though that's important." Aiden raises a hand. "I'm talking about _her_. What will she say? What will happen to her when she finally finds out what you've become? When she finds out that you've re-entered the life she worked so hard to take you out of?"

He's quiet for a moment. His eyes, I just notice, aren't as bright as they used to be. Lack of spirit, perhaps. Or cataracts.

"Then she'll probably do what she's always done for the past thirteen years," I say, putting my phone back in my pocket. "Blame you."

I'm done talking.

"I need that system key. Get it done, I'll be out of your hair."

Aiden exhales deeply, and nods. He hobbles over to the old laptop. Really old school stuff, all clunky and '80s. Looks like nobody trusts the new stuff anymore.

"It'll take me twenty minutes to configure the network."

"I can wait."

"No, Jacks, I don't think you can. But wait anyway."

I allow myself a wan smile. "Guess I'm just like my uncle."

He gets to work, and so do I. I reach for my phone. There's no signal here, because my uncle isn't stupid. The whole house is designed like a bunker, complete with radar-proof, null-penetration film hidden inside the walls. But I don't mind being disconnected.

I open up the document manager and start working on my homework.

Every minute's precious, right?

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><p><strong>Many thanks to glenarvon for leaving the first review! This story's just been a welcome distraction during a particularly busy dry spell. I'm still working on my Frozen fanfic <span>Answering The Blizzard<span>, and though Watch_Dogs and Frozen can't be less alike, elements from one fic tend to find their way into the other. Hope you leave a comment letting me know how you liked this story! And check out my other works if you've got the time.**


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